Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.

The line encapsulates a recurring theme in Chomsky’s political writing: that “terrorism” is often treated as something only enemies do, while violence carried out or enabled by powerful states is rhetorically exempted. Read this way, the “easy way” is not a literal policy fix but a moral and conceptual challenge—redefine terrorism consistently, then recognize how one’s own government (and citizens through consent, taxes, or political support) may be implicated in coercive violence abroad. The quote functions as a provocation aimed at shifting attention from reactive security measures to the upstream causes and practices—intervention, proxy wars, collective punishment—that can themselves fit standard definitions of terror.